DEVAPREETA JENA - POEMS

Devapreeta Jena is 23 years old who just completed her masters in Sociology from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her discipline made her to look at things objectively, therefore most of the times she finds herself analyzing things around her, be it politics, literature or people. But she makes sure that her sanity is also kept intact and she finds the medium of poetry the perfect medium to turn silences, innuendos and subtleties of life into words. Often she struggles with words, because her objective self is always in conflict with her subjective self. She loves reading fiction, contemporary theory and has discovered newfound interest in psychology.She thinks that poetry can become a platform where one can ask questions to oneself as well as to the whole society. She thinks through poetry one can seek beauty in harsh memories and even in nauseating experience of everyday life. She has currently taken a break from academics and exploring poems by Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.

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​A Debauch Friend

​We meet once in eight months
Only to give wings to our narratives
Narratives of degeneracy
Who said decomposing oneself is not part of existing?
Who said conscious perversion is not living?
She breathes in wantonness
I breathe in conscious self destruction
She consciously plays the victim of a lewd world
In a secret attempt to pull the immoral trigger off her head
I take a dip in moral corruption, to test the grand theories in my head
She takes a swim in debauchery, to debunk the moral burden imposed on a wife
We will again see each other
Only to give wings to our chaotic narratives!
 
 

MODERN LOVE
​

​Hopping into your lover’s shiny car, only to undergo the usual drill silently
First the monuments, then some eatery joint and finally anticipating the last stop
Hauled to a secluded place, injecting the environment with esoteric musings
Only to know that they are falling to some deaf ears, meeting their demise
By colliding with frosted windows of the car
Even despair has a perky laughter!
 
Windows were rolled up, a moment of intimacy followed sans inhibitions;
Both lovers unconsciously conforming to the patterns of routinised portrayal
of some flimsy affection .
Only to arrive at one possible outcome
Gliding over each other, sliding his hand to wake up his animate object
and begging his lover to give a hand- an extension to masturbatory hand
Evoking a perverse defense of some kind, “my hunter is not in some search of some orifice”
But this time she made a breach, to what she considered to be normal
Settling in a comfortable position of an observer
She watched his guy to masturbate helplessly!
 
If he looked for a masturbatory hand
 She shifted her stance from a an embodiment of a useful hand to an useless deliberate watcher of afflictions of human wretchedness
While savouring this facile power driven activity, something got unearthed
A transactional relationship covered in sweet nothings of yesterday and tomorrow
Of general niceties, of relentless promises, of manifestation of cultural and material assets
To preserve individual needs only in actual performatory dependence, not in isolation
 
When Intoxicating effects of repetitive pleasure has started to wear off
And when you finally look into the eyes of a person sitting next to you
Smoking a cigarette casually, two eyes staring at each other, a threatening void crawls in
 Stealthily spreading across all over the body like some creeper plant growing mercilessly
But a void is deferred and it will be deferred numerous times in future, one after another
In gloomy murmurs, in tragic storytelling, in silent adieus
Counting stars on return back home, she felt less jolted this time
Because “routinised desire” for once confronted
the cacophony of abandoned voices
A stand-off between habitual desire of a rusted kind and desire(undiscovered) as such!!!!
 
 

A FRIENDLY FOE-WORLD WE INHABIT
​

​In a world that is hostile, why do you seek companionship?
In a world that is nonchalant, why do you seek permanence?
In a world that is driven by passive love, why do you go on hunting evidence of love?
Yes we are talking about post-modernism, where everything is modern, except people.
Where relationships are governed by utility, and education motivated by prospect of securing a job
Where we unconsciously consume half-fragmented pieces, and label them as knowledge
Aren’t we all suffering from amnesia?
Our memories facing senescence, not because we are turning old
But everybody wants to give up the capacity to undergo the trauma of a memory
We are on our way to become labourers; we will happily sell our labour without any questions
And forget to ask basic existential questions
Because we do not exist anymore, we are the worms occupying space
Yes, in foreseeable future, I envisage an apocalypse
We won’t budge, because we have been trained to become consenting individuals
This apocalypse is nothing like World Wars; it would creep slowly in our lives, and seep into our lives without asking our permission.
What is this apocalypse we are talking about?
It is something that once Hannah Arendt[i] warned us about, the ultimate fate of human condition
Where everything will get mixed up, and you will lose your discerning power to demarcate different realms.
The realm of labour, the realm of work and the realm of action
Politics have become just a medium to address immediate
Revolution has found itself limited on streets and social media
And angst is expressed by sharing memes on Face book
If this is not new repression, then what it is?
Reading has acquired an altogether different hapless twist, everybody is a reader now
Everybody reads, in juxtaposition with everybody consume, consciously or subconsciously snippets of information, enlightening quotes, and short excerpts picked from books.
Readers they are, aren’t they?
Vomiting vociferously names of authors, being a relentless quote monger
Is this a beginning of knowledge or,
Is this a beginning of the pretence of knowledge?
But, I defend this pretension. What is youth without pretension?
I rebut, pretension is dialectically embedded in authenticity.
A successful pretension can only be carried out by an authentic reader.
But they say, we would sacrifice authenticity in our mindless drive to elevate pretension.
Love doesn’t need to be re-invented anymore, it is just provided like any other commodity right at your doorstep.
Aren’t we seeking sanitized version of love, love without conflicts; propagated by dating sites and marriage matrimonial websites
Why every enjoyment has acquired obscene pattern of engaging in small talk??
Nonetheless we are living, political beings we are; because we are the next progenies of critical thought.
We have made a difficult promise to ourselves, not to live like automatons anymore


[i] In “Human condition”, Hannah Arendt identifies three aspects of human existence that are work, labor and action. According to her, these three realms add unique components to human existence. In the realm of labor, individuals are concerned with economic sustenance and physical reproduction. Work, on the other hand, is the realm of creating artefacts with the help of implements. In other words, it is the sphere of fabrication and creating something which is not natural. Thus it is not as such required for economic well being rather it is governed by instrumentality, more of means and end category. Creation is important aspect of work which further gets memorialized in history, in drama, in poetry etc. Action is the realm where people engage together and participate in discussions. It is a matter of taking risks and contingency. It is not instrumental and not governed by means-end reasoning. Actors do not know precisely what it is that their actions might lead; and in acting they disclose who they are and what they desire from society at large. For Arendt this is the sphere which epitomizes human as political being.